The present invention relates to a method and process for uniformly describing media assets, such as video, images, graphics, text, and audio, such that a multiplicity of tools used for production, approval, inventory, sales, rights management and other media management processes, can easily interoperate against a uniform view of a consistent set of media repositories.
A large number of businesses have media as a critical component. Media companies such as television studios, networks, multimedia and Internet publishing have media assets as their primary product. Advertising companies use media as their service delivery vehicle. Companies that are not in the media business also need to manage media assets from training videos to promotional literature.
A plethora of tools, processes and people are involved in the production, management, search, sales, and distribution of the media assets of a company. Media assets get fragmented across different systems because different tools and different departments handle different processes. Furthermore, there is a strong interoperability problem as these tools and departments often use different description schemes for the media assets. Thus, managing media assets is an important and difficult problem.
A standard description scheme for managing media assets will benefit a large number of industries that manage media as a direct or indirect part of their business. It will benefit the tools and processes used for managing media assets by allowing them to interact based on a shared standard description scheme.
A number of different tools and processes are used during the lifecycle of a media asset. For example, for a video asset, one tool is used for editing the video, another for logging it into the Digital Library, another for searching videos in the library, another for tracking the approval workflow, and possibly another for version control. A common description scheme for the media asset and its management information would ensure that these tools could use data generated by other tools, and in turn generate data that other tools could use. This would allow interoperability across different task specific tools on the same media assets which are stored in a common media repository.
In an advertising agency scenario, for a particular promotional effort, a number of media assets may need to be created and managed. The media assets could be videos for television, audio for radio commercials, and photographs, graphics and text for print advertisements. Different departments, such as print and video, may need to look at other material so as to maintain a common theme. An account manager may need to keep track of the progress on the media assets across the different departments. This manager may have access to view media asset collections for other advertisement campaigns, but the customer may be allowed to view only the assets related to his campaign. A description scheme for managing a logical collection of media assets and access to same would be very useful in these tasks.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a standard description scheme for media assets.
It is another object of the invention to access a Digital Library comprising a centralized repository of media assets using a standard description scheme.
Yet another object of the invention is to provide a self-describing media asset description scheme such that a variety of different tools and users can access relevant information about a media asset from the single description.
Still another object of the invention is to provide a standard media asset description scheme which can be integrated into existing media handling tools and processes in order to standardize not only the storage access but also the local descriptions of media assets.
The foregoing and other objects are realized by the present invention which comprises a two-pronged solution: (1) a Digital Library to provide a centralized repository of the media assets and (2) a standard description scheme that will allow interoperation of a variety of tools and processes required for managing media assets. In the invention, a description scheme is provided that addresses information needed for managing media assets independent of their type. In addition, the invention provides a description scheme for logical collections of media assets. The media asset management description scheme may be based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), to ensure maximum interoperability.